You would be forgiven for thinking that Euphoria was all wrapped up with. After all, as things stand, it has the entire world stacked against it. No new episodes have been seen for two years and nine months at this point. Narratively, season two ended without any big cliffhangers to clear up, or even all that many interesting plot beats to continue.
And then there’s its cast. Since Euphoria went off the air, its troupe of young actors have all been rocketed into the stratosphere. Jacob Elordi has become Emerald Fennell’s go-to muse, appearing in both Saltburn and her upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation. Maude Apatow has gone away and directed her first movie. Colman Domingo was nominated for an Oscar for Rustin, and may well be nominated for another for Sing Sing. Sydney Sweeney has become an old-school four-quadrants movie star thanks to her ability to appeal to young women and horny teenage boys in equal measure. And the last few years have seen Zendaya become even more Zendaya than ever, which is impressive because she was already pretty Zendaya to begin with.
This leaves Euphoria in something of a predicament, since any new series would presumably face the logistical challenge of assembling several people who are all far busier, more expensive and (potentially) demanding than they were when they were first hired several years ago. Also, it’s been almost three years. This is a show about schoolchildren, and all the actors are now in their late twenties. All said, it doesn’t look good.
But, hey, that isn’t going to stop HBO from having another crack anyway. In a call with investors this week, the network’s chair, Casey Bloys, made it very clear that there will be more Euphoria, and there will be more Euphoria soon. “Nothing has changed,” he said. “We are happy. We’re moving ahead. It’s eight episodes.”
Probably. After all, the saga of Euphoria’s third season has been long and arduous. It was first announced all the way back in February 2022, just after the second season’s fourth episode aired. A few months after that, Bloys told Deadline that the third season would not be its last, hinting that it could run for more than four in total, refocusing the series on the existing cast as adults.
Filming was scheduled to begin in March 2023. And then it didn’t. The show’s production designer then said that it would start filming in June 2023. And it didn’t. Maude Apatow then told Vogue that it would start filming in the second half of 2023. And, you guessed it, it didn’t.
This is in part down to last year’s writers’ strike, and in part due to the unexpected death of the cast member Angus Cloud, but that isn’t the whole picture. In March this year Variety reported that there was conflict over the quality of the scripts. In creator Sam Levinson’s original vision, Zendaya’s Rue would become a supporting character who (bizarrely) had become a private detective. Zendaya reportedly didn’t like this, and pushed for a version where Rue was off drugs and worked as a pregnancy surrogate. But HBO didn’t think that this felt enough like Euphoria, so that was scrapped too. One potential reason for the network’s newly tight reins might be The Idol, the Sam Levinson show that enjoyed a chaotic production, terrible ratings and a legacy as a bloated vanity project.
As such, in March 2024, the whole thing was off. Scripts were still being written, HBO said, but the delay in production was so indefinite that the cast was freed up to work on other projects.
However, now that the show is apparently back on, nobody seems particularly jazzed to be called back to work. Talking to Vanity Fair, Sweeney said that Euphoria’s uncertain future had stunted her success. “There were definitely a few projects that I had to pass on because I was supposed to be going back to Euphoria,” she said. “But because I am producing now, I was able to say, ‘You know what? I don’t think this is happening. I’m going to put some of my own projects on the slate.’ That’s how Anyone But You happened.”
In contrast, Zendaya just seems fully checked out, also telling Vanity Fair that the show is “slated for January, I believe. I haven’t read anything yet … I don’t really have much of an answer except for right now it’s set to start shooting in January.”
